2012: The Year in Craft Beer

Here are some of the highlights from a great year for BC’s craft beer industry.

7 New breweries!

BC craft beer drinkers welcomed seven new breweries in 2012 (eight if you count Hoyne which opened in late December 2011). Most of these new breweries have already made a mark on the brewing scene, and some have even established themselves as major players in their regions:

I had the pleasure of visiting each of these new operations this year, and the common thread shared by them all is a love for good craft beer, a strong sense of community and a desire to play a supporting role in the province’s craft beer industry.

Innumerable & Diverse Seasonal Beers

British Columbia is a hotbed for seasonal/limited release beers. Craft breweries compete with each other to slake beer lovers’ thirst for variety, releasing eclectic special releases such as pumpkin-infused or fresh-hopped beers in the fall; barrel-aged imperial stouts and Christmas beers each winter; berry beers, saisons and weizens each summer; and other creative inventions throughout the year.

The explosion in craft brewing in BC is going thermonuclear with the addition of at least eight new microbreweries, most of them in Vancouver, which is poised to take over from Victoria as craft beer central. Here are the eight new breweries that should open in 2013, along with new expanded facilities for Central City Brewing (Surrey), Red Truck Brewing (Vancouver) and Steamworks (Burnaby):

This will bring the total of craft breweries in BC to 58 by my count (give or take one or two depending on whether you count Granville Island and Turning Point as craft/micros or not). I know of three others in the works that aren’t quite ready to start up this year and I have heard of several other possibilities, so it’s pretty likely we’ll top 60 before too long. Two years ago, there were 41. That’s right – the industry will have grown by nearly 50% in just three years. There’s never been a better time to be a beer lover on the west coast – and British Columbia’s craft beer revolution shows no sign of slowing down.